Practice 8 · The Focus and Mindfulness Pair

Focus Meditation (10 minutes)

Get into a comfortable, stable position. Take time to relax your body. Close your eyes softly, and meet your mind: see how it feels, how active or still it is.

Bring your attention to your breath:

• Go through the entire cycle: breathe in, pause, breathe out, pause.
• Find the coolness and warmth of the air.
• Feel the natural beat of breathing.

Whenever your mind wanders, to thoughts, feelings, or emotions, just observe where it has wandered, and then gently bring it back to the breath. No force. No judgment. Only a modest yielding.

Sit in silent practice for ten minutes.

Mindfulness Meditation (10 minutes)

Now, without moving, open your consciousness as with the opening of the aperture of a camera:

• Keep the breath as anchor.
• Let sounds, sensations, thoughts, feelings come as they come.
• Gently label them: “hearing,” “feeling,” “thinking.”

There's no need to push anything away or pull anything closer. Let every experience come, be there as long as it is there, and be gone when it is gone, like clouds floating in the sky.

This is not controlling; this is seeing.

Sit in silent practice for ten minutes.

Closing

• Release your attention from all objects.
• Breathe in and out, three times, slowly and deeply.
• Notice how your mind is now.
• Open your eyes gently.

You have just exercised the two fundamental movements of awareness: the focal point, and the panoramic view of mindfulness. They are the basis of all that is to come.